Inside Story

Education reform is back on the national agenda. Among the many issues being discussed are the need for a significant improvement in teaching skills and standards and the knotty and persistent problem of entrenched inequity of opportunities and outcomes. A marked flight away from government secondary schools has been amplified by the previous government's approach to parental choice and funding patterns.



Professor Jack Keating from the University of Melbourne has written a report, A New Federalism in Australian Education: A Proposal for a National Reform Agenda, which argues for a major shift in funding and accountability arrangements across government and non-government schools and between state and federal governments, a new national quality agency and better early childhood education. Jack Keating summarised the main thrust of his suggestions for Peter Clarke.

Six months into his presidency, Barack Obama is facing the first major legislative test of his administration: the passing of his reforming health care bill, with a potentially massive impact on spending. If Obama doesn't succeed on this key legislation, his entire reform agenda and his presidency will be fundamentally diminished.



Australian-born Professor Simon Jackman, based at Stanford University in California, is currently a visiting professor at the United States Study Centre at the University of Sydney, from where he discussed Obama's prospects as a reformist legislator via iChat with Peter Clarke.

Six months into his presidency, Barack Obama is facing the first major legislative test of his administration: the passing of his reforming health care bill, with a potentially massive impact on spending. If Obama doesn't succeed on this key legislation, his entire reform agenda and his presidency will be fundamentally diminished.



Australian-born Professor Simon Jackman, based at Stanford University in California, is currently a visiting professor at the United States Study Centre at the University of Sydney, from where he discussed Obama's prospects as a reformist legislator via iChat with Peter Clarke.

It's relatively easy to accept the fundamentals of evolutionary science when it seeks to describe changes in physical features through the processes of natural selection. But it becomes harder when evolutionary psychologists argue that our ways of thinking, use of language and even creating and appreciating art also evolved during the time of our Pleistocene ancestors. In 1994, Stephen Pinker was praised and attacked for his book The Language Instinct.



Now, a philosopher of art from the University of Canterbury, Denis Dutton, has "reverse engineered" his analyses of our artistic creativity and cultural behaviours in the twenty-first century to argue that humans evolved an aesthetic urge from the dawn of the species. The inevitable fierce debate has erupted again both within the evolutionary science community and across the science-religion fault lines. Via Skype from his home in Christchurch, New Zealand, Professor Dutton tells Peter Clarke about the thrust of his new book, The Art Instinct.

Humans have always craved and shared news. News journalism started to emerge after the Gutenberg Revolution in the fifteenth century eventually blossoming as a profession with the Industrial Revolution and the invention of a clutch of mass media technologies that characterised the twentieth century. Then, on the eve of the twenty-first century, another revolution, as profound as the Gutenberg, started a new wave of even more complex and layered transformations. We are in the "one-reeler" stage of that revolution right now, intertwined with a global financial crisis. News and the professionals who fashion its forms and disseminations are caught up in a whirlpool of often mystifying changes. Well-known media blogger and journalist, Margaret Simons, herself wrestling with the challenges of adapting to novel demands and opportunities, tells Peter Clarke there is no turning back now to the old one-to-many model of news journalism.

Digital radio as an evolving technology has been around for over twenty years. Now, after much plotting, planning, tests and delays, it will start up in Australia in the middle of 2009. It comes with a joint promise: better audio quality and potentially more diversity of audio content. But since serious discussions about its introduction here first took place about fifteen years ago, the digital media world, and the audio aspects of it specifically ,have changed dramatically. The internet has blossomed. MP3 players and other mobile digital devices have proliferated. Podcasts in their various forms are now commonplace. Our listening habits and options have shifted and multiplied. And digital radio in Britain has struggled. It is into this ever-mutating media environment, where much audio content has been decoupled from its broadcast origins or actually starts as a digital non-broadcast creation, that digital radio launches itself with all the high hopes of a new medium or a very old one with new credentials. But will it succeed? Will consumers buy a digital radio receiver? Why would they? How will broadcast radio in its digital form make its mark in the jungle of competing hybrids? Jock Given from the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology gives Peter Clarke an unvarnished look at the odds for this digital late comer. This podcast is part of the "Inside Story" series.

For many people around the world, especially in developing countries, famine is not an abstract notion. Wars, crop failures, callous urban elites and ruthless dictatorships are the classic causes, but countervailing factors are increasingly at work. Could it be that a true famine is now close to impossible, with globalised communications and relief systems? Is democracy a sure protection from mass starvation? Does the global financial crisis increase the likelihood of famine? Peter Clarke spoke to Cormac O'Grady, a professor of economic history at University College Dublin and author of Famine: A Short History. This podcast is part of the "Inside Story" series.

If any area of social policy deserves the label, "never-ending-story", it is childcare in Australia. Once the province of community-based providers, from the late eighties childcare gradually became broadly privatised under both Labor and Coalition governments. Recurring questions of standards and improved childcare quality were largely pushed to the background. Using tax-funded subsidies and contemporary corporate practices, ABC Learning and other companies took off, flew high and crashed. Despite soothing rhetoric from the Rudd government, the fall-out threatens to hamper more progressive policies and on-the-ground quality childcare for quite a while. As the global financial crisis tightens its grip, childcare and family policy researcher, Professor Deborah Brennan (UNSW) discusses the story so far, and the likely next moves, with Peter Clarke.



This podcast is part of the "Inside Story" series.

Black Saturday seared itself into the history books and the memories of many on 7 February 2009. The grieving, the slow recovery and the debates continue. Over missions of years, the world's tallest flowering plants, the great Mountain Ash eucalypts of the forests of Victoria, have evolved as "fire weeds" ensuring their survival by spreading their seeds in ash beds open to the light previously shadowed by their towering canopies. They die to survive. Their cycles are much longer than ours. But their special relationship to the inevitability of devastating fires withing the "fire flume" of the Victorian bush offers a tough but essential lesson for the local communities and policy makers at both state and federal levels, as historian Tom Griffiths (Australian National University) tells Peter Clarke.

The Iranian presidential election campaign had many of the trappings of a western democratic election, including mass rallies and live television debates. The incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was handicapped by his inept economic management, Iran's reduced oil income and the changed geo-political narrative with the election of Barack Obama. Election night brought a shock result: Ahmadinejad was returned in a first round landslide, out-polling the reformist, Mir-Houssein Mousavi, two to one. Since then there have been waves of popular protests and a violent crackdown by the regime. Scores have died. Ali Ansari, professor of Iranian history and director of the Iranian Institute at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, updates Peter Clarke on events since the presidential election. The report, Preliminary Analysis of the Voting Figures in Iran's 2009 Presidential Election, is published by Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews. Edited by Ali Ansari, Director, Institute of Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews, and Associate Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Chatham House. Research and analysis: Daniel Berman and Thomas Rintoul, Institute of Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews.



This podcast is part of the "Inside Story" series.